All figures are reported directly in the paper. Each corresponds to a primary empirical result from Sections 2–3 or Table 7.
A structural feature of long-run equity returns is strong positive skewness. Compounding amplifies this asymmetry: losses are bounded at −100% (limited liability), while gains face no upper ceiling. Over long horizons, most individual stocks underperform the mean, and the mean itself far exceeds the median.
"Positive skewness arises in part because there is no ceiling on the potential magnitude of positive returns, while as long as legal systems incorporate limited liability, no return can be less than −100%." — Bessembinder (2026), Section 2
Among the top-30 cumulative performers (Table 1), the median annualized return is just 13.02% and the mean is 13.00% — moderate by most standards. What differentiates these stocks is duration: their average listing period is 93.9 years. The Altria/Vulcan comparison, drawn directly from the paper, illustrates the non-linear force of compounding with particular clarity.
Both firms were listed for the full 100 years. Altria's annualized return is 1.18× Vulcan's. Its cumulative return is 8.81× larger.
"The data reported in Table 1 support the relevance of the adage focused on the importance of 'time in the market.'" — Bessembinder (2026), Section 2
Section 3 provides a precise decomposition of the 29,081 sample firms. The structure is striking: 59.1% of firms destroy wealth, a further 37.2% generate positive SWC only sufficient to offset that destruction, and the remaining 3.7% — 1,082 firms — generate all $91 trillion of net SWC.
Table 7 reports the number of firms required to account for 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of net SWC across three periods. The results document a sharp increase in concentration between the 1926–2016 period and the updated sample through 2025.
The 2017–2025 sub-period generated $48.36 trillion in net SWC — nearly as much as the preceding nine decades combined — with just 13 firms accounting for half of that total. The top 30 firms in that sub-period account for 61.2% of post-2016 net SWC, compared to 31.1% for the equivalent group over 1926–2016. Nvidia alone represents 9.32% of post-2016 net SWC; the comparable figure for the top 2016 firm (Exxon Mobil) was 2.89%.
Reproduced from Table 5 of the paper. SWC is stated in millions of 2025 dollars, measured in excess of the T-bill benchmark. The top five firms alone — Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon — account for 21.4% of the $91 trillion total.
| # | Company | SWC ($M) | % of Total | Cumul. % | First | Last |
|---|
Reproduced from Table 1 of the paper. The key finding is that extreme cumulative outcomes are produced not by extraordinary annualized rates, but by moderate rates sustained over very long listing periods, averaging 93.9 years among the top 30. The median annualized return in this group is 13.02%; the highest is 16.53% (Altria). Hover over the annualized return chart below for firm-level detail.
| # | Company | Cum. Wealth / $1 | Annual. Return | First | Last | Years |
|---|
Table 3 reports decade-horizon buy-and-hold returns for each of the ten decades from 1926 to 2025. The figures below show the percentage of stocks that exceeded matched-period T-bill returns within each decade. Blue = majority beat T-bills; red = minority beat T-bills. A structural shift is apparent: the average across the first six decades was 61.2%; across the last four it fell to 47.9%.
The median decade-horizon return averaged 63.6% across the first six decades versus 5.8% across the most recent four — despite strong value-weighted market performance from 1986 to 2025. The authors attribute this partly to the surge in listings of younger, smaller companies during the 1970s and 1980s, many of which did not survive, documented by Fama and French (2004).
This page is a research companion to the working paper cited above. It has no affiliation with the author or Arizona State University. All numerical claims are drawn directly from the paper as cited; no figure is approximated without explicit labeling. Readers are directed to the full paper for methodological detail, including the formal SWC computation in the Appendix.
Data source: CRSP monthly stock return database, CIZ version, January 1926 – December 2025. Treasury-bill data supplement Professor Kenneth French's series with SBBI data for January–June 1926.